Ranting Demagogues: how censorship works in free societies

The response of Britain's media to the conspiracy in Venezuela
provided an object lesson in how censorship works in free societies.
The episode was a journalistic disgrace.
John Pilger
26 April, 2002

Last month, I wrote about Venezuela, pointing out that little had
been reported in this country about the achievements of Hugo Chvez
and the threat to his reforming government from the usual alliance
of a corrupt local elite and the United States. When the conspirators
made their move on 12 April, the response of the British media
provided an object lesson in how censorship works in free societies.http://www.medialens.org/articles_2002/jp_venezuela.html

The BBC described Chvez as "not so much a democrat as an autocrat",
echoing the Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who abused him as
"a ranting demagogue". Alex Bellos, the Guardian's South America
correspondent, reported, as fact, that "pro-Chvez snipers had killed
at least 13 people" and that Chvez had requested exile in Cuba.
"Thousands of people celebrated overnight, waving flags, blowing
whistles . . ." he wrote, leaving the reader with the clear
impression that almost everybody in Venezuela was glad to see the
back of this "playground bully", as the Independent called him.

Within 48 hours, Chvez was back in office, put there by the mass of
the people, who came out of the shanty towns in their tens of
thousands. Defying the army, their heroism was in support of a leader
whose democratic credentials are extraordinary in the Americas, south
and north. Having won two presidential elections, the latest in 2000,
by the largest majority in 40 years, as well as a referendum and
local elections, Chvez was borne back to power by the impoverished
majority whose "lot", wrote Bellos, he had "failed to improve" and
among whom "his popularity had plummeted".

The episode was a journalistic disgrace. Most of what Bellos and
others wrote, using similar words and phrases, turned out to be
wrong. In Bellos's case, this was not surprising, as he was reporting
from the wrong country, Brazil. Chvez said he never requested asylum
in Cuba; the snipers almost certainly included agents provocateurs;
"almost every sector of society [Chvez] antagonised" were
principally members of various oligarchies he made pay tax for the
first time, including the media, and the oil companies, whose taxes
he doubled in order to raise 80 per cent of the population to a
decent standard of living. His opponents also included army officers
trained at the notorious School of the Americas in the United States.

In a few years, Chvez had begun major reforms in favour of the
indigenous poor, Venezuela's unpeople. In 49 laws adopted by the
Venezuelan Congress, he began real land reform, and guaranteed
women's rights and free healthcare and education up to university
level.

He opposed the human rights abuses of the regime in neighbouring
Colombia, encouraged and armed by Washington. He extended a hand to
the victim of an illegal 40-year American blockade, Cuba, and sold
the Cubans oil. These were his crimes, as well as saying that bombing
children in Afghanistan was terrorism. Like Chile under Allende and
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, precious little of this was
explained to the western public. Like the equally heroic uprising in
Argentina last year, it was misrepresented as merely more Latin
American chaos.

Last week, the admirable Glasgow University Media Group, under Greg
Philo, released the results of a study which found that, in spite of
the saturation coverage of the Middle East, most television viewers
were left uninformed that the basic issue was Israel's illegal
military occupation. "The more you watch, the less you know" - to
quote Danny Schechter's description of American television news - was
the study's conclusion.

Take US secretary of state Colin Powell's "peace mission". Regardless
of America's persistent veto of United Nations resolutions calling
for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, and regardless
of Powell calling Ariel Sharon "my personal friend", an American
"peace mission" was the absurd news, repeated incessantly. Similarly,
when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights last week voted
40-5 to condemn Israel for its "mass killing", the news was not this
near-unanimous expression of world opinion, but the British
government's rejection of the resolution as "unbalanced".

Journalists are often defensive when asked why they faithfully follow
the deceptions of great power. It is not good enough for ITN to say
dismissively, in response to the Glasgow Media Group findings, that
"we are not in the business of giving a daily history lesson", or for
the BBC to waffle about its impartiality when some recent editions of
Newsnight might have been produced by the Foreign Office. In these
dangerous times, one of the most destructive weapons of all is
pseudo-information.

John Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers of the World, is published
next month by Verso.

[Reproduced, with permission, from John Pilger's website at www.johnpilger.com]